Just spoke to Andy Luger, who confirms that he has decided not to get into the race.

“I decided very late last night, I’m not going to run for Congress,” he said. 

Lugar said he found he couldn’t disrupt his law practice on such short notice after having done the same thing two years ago to run for county attorney.

The dwindling field of heavily-mentioned candidates on the DFL side now features three legislators, State Sen. Terri Bonoff  of Minnetonka, and state Reps. Melissa Hortman of Brooklyn Park  and Steve Simon of St. Louis Park.

Luger was considered among the front-runners for the DFL endorsement. In 2006, Luger won an impressive first-ballot endorsement over Mike Freeman for Hennepin County attorney. He then lost in the general election to Freeman, perhaps because of the drawing power of the Freeman name (Freeman is the son of former Gov. Orville Freeman.) Luger faced a potential similar problem in the congressional race when it looked like Buck Humphrey might get in. Then Humphrey removed that obstacle last week by declaring his non-candidacy. Luger seemed poised to go.

He met with key advisors yesterday, spent the day campaigning and said he loved it. But when he sat down with the calendar, he decided that he had made commitments to clients, cases and work-related travel that would interfere with the need to campaign full-time.

Luger works on white-collar crime and other matters for the Minneapolis law firm of Greene Espel. He took a hiatus from the firm to campaign full-time in 2006. But he had seen that race coming and had time to prepare to disrupt his practice. Having just rebuilt the practice, the sudden announcement this month that Rep. Jim Ramstad was not seeking reelection left him with a need for a full-time commitment commitment but without time to prepare his clients and his cases for the interruption, Lugar said.

Lugar said that the DFL nominee will have a good chance at winning the election, and he believed he had a good shot at the nomination, but so do the three legislators who are still publicly considering the run. He called the race “wide open.” There will very likely be more candidates getting in. 

On the Republican side, there is a long list of potential candidates, the best known of whom is Brian Sullivan, a businessman, Republican National Committee member and one-time gubernatorial candidate.